4 Quick Steps to Change the Default Homepage of WordPress Blog

The homepage is one of the most important page on your WordPress blog.

The homepage is the face of your blog.

It’s the first impression of your blog.

The homepage has to speak itself.

Once a visitor lands on your blog, the first thing they visit is the homepage.

Statistics show that visitors won’t stay more than 5 seconds on a page and they quit mostly at 5th second. If that is the case then your homepage must be the best page on your blog.

Really you have to spend a lot of time to make the homepage better.

Having a great homepage helps to showcase your blog to the visitors and also, it helps to achieve your blogging goals.

Here at BlashO, during the earlier days, I used to have a home page like a blog style, where you can see the list of all blog posts only.

Over a period of time, I understood that a blog should be conceptual and it should be on a specific theme.

I redesigned the blog many times and finally, settled with this current design.

If you see my homepage, you will be able to understand, what exactly BlashO is all about. After working on numerous iterations, I also came to know that keeping it simple is the most important principle of web design and also, to be mobile friendly.

Today in this article, I will take you through the exact steps to change the homepage style of your blog. Most of the WordPress themes have the default homepage that you will be seeing as a list of recent blog posts. So you want to change that default design into something more creative.

Important points to consider in changing your homepage.

Whenever you are changing your homepage, make sure you are keeping the below points into consideration:

The first thing is the purpose of your blog. Your homepage should speak the purpose of your blog and always be focused towards the purpose.

Consider what do you want to achieve, the goal of your blog. Your key messages should be towards your goal.

Keep the fresh content on the homepage, simply list all the recent blog posts so that your visitors will be able to easily locate the latest content.

Make sure that you are not making homepage too heavy because it badly affects the blogs loading time. When you pages are loading quickly, your visitors will love-to-browse your site. Statistic says, that visitors don’t wait more than 5 seconds to see a page so always reduce the load time.

Be mobile friendly. Any blog design should consider mobile screens because most of your blog readers will be from mobile devices.

Call to actions should take visitors towards your goal. It should be based on the purpose of your blog and you have to place a call-to-action at the right place. It can be anything like a form to capture email ids, a button to a specific page, an offer for download etc.

The following infographics (reference) show the must have elements of a homepage:

Whenever you are customising the design of your homepage, make sure, what is the purpose of your homepage and what the message you want to convey to your audience. Without being clear on this, don’t change the design of your homepage.

When you make a design using Avada theme you can easily customise the homepage without touching any code.

Avada theme has a lot of options using that you can simply drag-and-drop the required widgets and create an awesome homepage yourself that too mobile friendly.

Let me know, how do you design the homepage of your blog? It may help other WordPress users also.